Paper - Betteredge: The Victorian Man

The story of The Moonstone opens with Gabriel Betteredge, house steward (or butler) to Lady Julia Verinder. Betteredge is the epitome of an English gentleman - though not actually noble himself - he embodies those views that were characteristic of that time. During the Victorian time period society held specific views on things such as marriage, purity, class structure, gender norms, imperialism, the Orient and Orientals (Orientalism), and much more. Through a study of Betteredge’s character, a reader can see Victorian views on many of the aspects of Victorian life, including marriage and dealing with the East. Betteredge is a man of his time; through his descriptions and dialogue in which he engages the reader Victorian thinking is prevalent, especially in regards to marriage and his way of viewing the East, otherwise known as Orientalism. 

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No. 1 (having her hair done). “Papa says he won’t hear of my marriage without a house in town!”

No. 2 (has Tea). “And mamma says I’m no to think of anyone who has not a moor in Scotland, and a Hunting Box at Melton.”

No. 3 (not yet “come out”). “Well I should not dream of marrying anyone who can’t afford all three!”

Marriage was viewed as a practical matter for many reasons, such as money, land, and titles. Marriage was not a “love” matter but a matter of mutual benefit and practicality, and often for money. These ideas of the Victorian period can be seen when looking at satirical cartoons and caricatures from Punch on the subject of marriage. In the image to the right, the young ladies are discussing how they cannot marry someone who does not have certain properties (image retrieved from victorianweb.org).  They are thinking both about social prestige that comes with owning property and the money that is associated with owning property. Marrying a man who has property thus is both practical for the young ladies, in terms of money, and also beneficial for their status. 

Betteredge describes of his own marriage as, “We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. How it was I don’t understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another’s way” show that he believes marriage is not about happiness (Collins 18 iBook edition).  When he went about choosing a wife he looked for someone who “chews her food well and sets her foot down firmly on the ground when she walks,” (Collins 17). When he approached Lady Verinder about marrying Selina Goby, he put it to her as: “‘it will be cheaper to marry her than to keep her’” (Collins 17). He even admits that he viewed the arrangement from the point of view of economy “with a dash of love” (Collins 22). Thus love was not his primary reason for marrying and it was not necessary for the proposal. For Betteredge marriage provided him with a “free” housekeeper, quite a practical purpose and serving a means.

In Betteredge’s description of Lady Verinder’s marriage he betrays the common thought of the time that marriage serves a practical purpose, even beyond social status and money. Sir John married Lady Verinder because he “wanted somebody to manage him;” (Collins 15). Betteredge describes their relationship as very beneficial for Sir John who, “found somebody to do it [manage him]; and what is more, he throve on it and grew fat on it, and lived happy and died easy on it,” (Collins 15). This shows Betteredge’s view that marriage is a practical matter; it is a matter of a wife managing a husband.

Studying Betteredge’s narrative the reader can see the Victorian views on marriage. In Victorian society marriage was a practical matter often concerning social status and money. Marriage was viewed as a mutually beneficial and not based on love. Marriage served a certain means; in Betteredge’s own marriage it was a means of housekeeping, in Lady Verinder’s it was a means of management. 

Betteredge not only is quintessential in his views of marriage but in the way he describes and views things from the East. This way of thinking is called Orientalism. Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said is, “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (3). Ontology is the study or theory of existence and epistemology is the study or theory of knowledge. In other words Orientalism is a style of thought based upon the differences in existence and knowledge of “the Orient” and “the Occident”. The Orient and the Occident are a geographical locations invented by man, often referred to as “the East” and “the West” respectively, where the Orient “is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West” (Said 5).  Orientalism then is “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Oriental’s special place in European Western experience” because the Orient is the place of some of Europe’s oldest and richest colonies and is one of Europe’s “most recurring images of the Other” (Said 1).  The Orient helped define Europe by being, in essence, a foil to Europe; it was everything that the West was not. Thus Orientalism was “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3).

Europe invested in the idea of the Orient as being “the Other” and having power over it, which gives weight to the style of thinking that is Orientalism. As Said explained in his book Orientalism, this way of thinking was “not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice” that was invested in for many generations (6). This investment made Orientalism an accepted system of knowledge through which the Orient was filtered into Western consciousness. Essentially, Orientalism was “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them")” (Said 44).  Orientalism thus became a system of truths for Europeans and in what every European could say about the Orient, he “was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (Said 204). Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University Amardeep Singh, summed up the stereotypes associated with Orientals and Orientalism based on Said’s work in his blog post of his notes for a presentation given at Lehigh University on 9/23/04. Singh describes Orientals as:

… despotic and clannish. They are despotic when placed in positions of power, and sly and obsequious when in subservient positions. Orientals, so the stereotype goes, are impossible to trust. They are capable of sophisticated abstractions, but not of concrete, practical organization or rigorous, detail-oriented analysis. Their men are sexually incontinent, while their women are locked up behind bars. Orientals are, by definition, strange.

Betteredge falls in line with the theory of Orientalism when he discusses the Indians, the Diamond and anything dealing with what Victorians referred to as “the East”.

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Illustration of the Indians from illustrated version of The Moonstone, 1868.

We first see Betteredge display typical Victorian thinking when he first come across the Indians on the terrace of the house and assumes they are jugglers. Indian jugglers became popular during the early 1800s because of their astonishing dexterity, in the mid 1800s however they became more associated with “conjuring” and mystical feats (Lamont and Bates). The terms conjurer and juggler became interchangeable and Victorians viewed an Indian juggler as “a performer of not only skillful but also mysterious feats” (Lamont and Bates 308). This mystery surrounding the feats, “led Victorians to regard ‘jugglers’ as one of the key images of India” (Lamont and Bates 308). Betteredge assuming the Indians were jugglers based on appearance then becomes understandable, since Victorians at the time viewed jugglers as an image of India.

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Illustration depicting the Indians from the Harper & Brothers Publishers 1868 The Moonstone, with many illustrations.

As we continue reading Betteredge’s narrative we further see Orientalism in his views of the Indians. He calls the Indian conspiracy “a conspiracy of living rogues” and he continues calling the Indians rogues throughout his narrative, even after they have been proven innocent of stealing the Diamond (Collins 67). When Betteredge detected someone lurking about the outside of the house, he “instantly suspected” the Indians because of a little ink bottle he found and thought that they, in “their heathenish way”, were trying to discover “the whereabouts of the Diamond” (Collins 97). He also views the Indians as foolish after discovering this little bottle, saying: “they were actually foolish enough to believe in their own magic” (Collins 99). When the Indians come to perform at Lady Verinder’s in an effort to find out more about the Moonstone, Mr. Murthwaite speaks to them in their own language. Betteredge describes the Indians response to Murthwaite as being done with “tigerish quickness” but then they recovered and began “bowing and salaaming to him in their most polite and snaky way” (Collins 142). Shortly after, Betteredge calls the Indians, “a set of murdering thieves” (Collins 147). All of these descriptive words he uses (rogue, heathenish, foolish, tigerish, snaky, thieves) are all words that can be attributed to looking at things through an Orientalism lens. Betteredge believes these Indians are all of these horrible things because that is how Victorians viewed the East. Orientalism holds that everything from the Orient, the East, is not to be trusted and is strange, dangerous, and opposite of the West, of England. 

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The real Koh-i-noor diamond

Betteredge also shows that he views things from the East through the lens of Orientalism when he discusses the Diamond. He calls the Diamond a blot on the Colonel’s character, “a devilish Indian Diamond”(67), a “plaguy Diamond” (88), “cursed” (89, 133, 165), and “unlucky” (Collins 30, 123). All of these descriptive words are words Victorians would use when talking about the East. Anything strange and unholy belonged to the East, the “Other”.  Later on in his narrative, Betteredge describes the dinner party as being possessed by “The Devil (or the Diamond)” equating the Diamond, a foreign object of the East, with the Devil exhibiting an Orientalist way of thinking (Collins 140). He also describes the theft of the Diamond as, “The devil’s dance of the Indian Diamond”, again alluding to the idea that Victorians had of things from the East being devilish and evil (Collins 386). Betteredge is so disturbed by Mr. Franklin Blake’s narrative about the Diamond that he wants to throw the Diamond into the quicksand to be rid of the curse. Towards the ending of his narrative Betteredge wishes “the Diamond had never found its way into this house!” because of the strange occurrences caused in the house since it came to Lady Verinder’s (Collins 284). This wanting to be rid of the Diamond and distance himself from it, is much like how the British want to distinguish themselves from the East and keep the East at arms length and not be associated with it.

Much like how England and the British were fascinated with the East because of its strangeness and mysteriousness, the Diamond fascinates Betteredge. Betteredge describes what he sees when the Diamond is presented to Rachel Verinder, filtering what he sees through his own lens of Orientalism. He describes Rachel as “a person fascinated” and Godfrey Ablewhite’s sisters as “devouring the jewel with their eyes, and screaming with ecstasy every time it flashed on them in a new light” (Collins 123). He himself is held captive by the Diamond saying it is a “yellow deep that drew your eyes into it so that they saw nothing else. It seemed unfathomable; this jewel, that you could hold between your finger and thumb, seemed unfathomable as the heavens themselves” (Collins 125). Betteredge admits that “The Diamond laid a hold on ME that I burst out with as large an ‘O’ as the Bouncers themselves” (Collins 125). When Rachel wears the Diamond into the dining room for her party, Betteredge claims that, “Everybody wondered at the prodigious size and beauty of the Diamond” (Collins 131). What we see in these descriptions is not only Betteredge himself displaying his Orientalist way of thinking but also him projecting this way of thinking onto the others.

When we meet Murthwaite, Betteredge describes him as an, “Indian traveller” who “at risk of his life, had penetrated in disguise where no European had ever set foot before” (Collins 132). He often refers to Murthwaite as the “Indian traveller” throughout the narrative. Betteredge also describes Murthwaite’s wanderings as being to  “wild places of the East” and “perilous Indian places” (Collins 132, 133). According to Betteredge, Murthwaite’s travels included dealing with “thieves and murderers in the outlandish places of the earth” (Collins 149). Here Betteredge betrays his views on the East as being dangerous, risky, and hazardous - all words that align with looking at the world through the lens of Orientalism, as Victorians often did.

Betteredge was a man of his time, from his views on marriage to his views on the East. Betteredge exemplifies Victorian thinking. He views marriage as a practical matter that benefited both parties and was not tied to love. Marriage served a certain means, whether that was money or status, or in his case a housekeeper, it was not a love matter. Victorians also viewed the East and all things associated with the East through the lens of what is called Orientalism. Betteredge also viewed all things he encountered that were from the East in this way of thinking. He viewed India as a dangerous risky place, he viewed the Indians as rogues, thieves, and not trustworthy, and he viewed the Diamond as evil and devilish. Betteredge was the epitome of a Victorian man.

Works Cited

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Public Domain, June 2012. iBook.

Lamont, Peter, and Crispin Bates. "Conjuring Images Of India In Nineteenth-Century Britain." Social History 32.3 (2007): 308-324. Academic Search Premier. Web. 28 Apr. 2015.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 2003 ed. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

Singh, Amardeep. "An Introduction to Edward Said, Orientalism, and Postcolonial Literary Studies." Web blog post. Amardeep Singh. Lehigh University, 24 Sept. 2004. Web. Apr. 2015.

Paper - Betteredge: The Victorian Man